Keeping Your Head When Everyone Else Is…

It’s weeks like this, where you have to manage multiple things at a high stress and time pressure, that easily break your daily routine and to-do system. Normally at this point I’d have scrapped my system in favour of trusting no one with any delegated tasks and therefore working 48 hour days to get everything done. The house becomes messy, the office a tip, and I obsessively cut out everything else in order to check off every last task.

A big part of GTD is context. The idea is to create lists based on context – office, home, phone calls. Now because I list every project with a hastag and then the task, i.e. ‘#Touch – Print off posters’, I have set up a smart list that searches every task with ‘#Touch’. The result is I have a list dedicated to every task for this project, rather than sifting through my ‘Next’ or ‘Waiting For’ lists. I can see everything I have tagged as ‘delegated’, who I’ve delegated it to, as well as ‘video’, ‘dtp’, etc, so I get a great 20,000 to 30,000 foot view on the project.

Along with Evernote as my external mind, I have found my system (I’ll share more details with you later) has stayed solid and helped me delegate and manage far better. Did I tell you I’m also writing a viral campaign proposal this week?